Last updated by tomski on 2021-10-28. Originally submitted by tomski on 2021-10-25.
WA Friday Lunch Talks are monthly meetings with presentations of current research results or research in progress by WA faculty, staff, or PhD students. Each talk is of 45 minutes (+15 minutes for discussion). We welcome all to a TALK: "Mastering Uncontrol: Exploratory Tropes and Spaces of Interiority in Contemporary North American and Polish Poetry" by prof. Paulina Ambroży (Friday, October 29, 13:15-14:15).
prof. Paulina Ambroży
Department of American Literature
"Mastering Uncontrol:
Exploratory Tropes and Spaces
of Interiority in Contemporary
North American and Polish Poetry"
October 29, 13:15-14:15
The talk will take place in
AULA HELIODORI
AND
LIVE ON MS TEAMS
ABSTRACT
The goal of the presentation is to examine the relation between new materialist, posthumanist and ecocritical discourses and revisionary modes of lyric address in selected contemporary North American and Polish poetry. My primary focus will be the last couple of decades which have brought the most significant shifts in onto-epistemological, ethical as well as aesthetic conceptions of life and of the self. Those shifts, which recognize the complex interconnectedness of human and non-human matter, have shaped current discourses of subjectivity, agency, identity, memory and interiority central to the lyrical project. Experimental poetry in particular has proven sensitive to the new materialist and posthumanist turn, seeking alternative ways to probe and redefine spaces of lyrical interiority outside the habitual anthropocentric frames. The particular focus of my inquiry will be spatial metaphors and forms deployed by the selected poets in their quests for the increasingly elusive interiority of the lyric self. As will be argued, the exploratory tropes and modes dominant in their spatial imaginary, such as navigation, echolocation, anatomy and cartography, reveal not only a desire to reach new levels of self-understanding and new depths of lyrical intimacy but serve also to articulate an anxiety about the posthumanist “unsealing” of the autonomous self. At once haunted by the solipsism of the lyric mode and working to overcome it, the poets under scrutiny question as well as expand the habitual spaces of lyric expression. To showcase this productive tension, I have selected the following volumes: Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic (2018), Evelyn Reilly’s Echolocation (2018), and Marcin Mokry’s Świergot (2019). The methodological framework informing the following inquiry will fuse new lyric studies, which explore revisionary modes in contemporary lyric practice, with ecocritical, posthumanist and new materialist concepts of subjectivity and matter.
Paulina Ambroży is Associate Professor and Head of American Literature Department at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. Her research centers on American ¬(more recently also Canadian and Polish) avant-garde and experimental poetry. She is interested in intersections between poetry, literary philosophy, science and the visual arts. She is the author of (Un)concealing the Hedgehog: Modernist American Poets and Contemporary Critical Theories (Poznań, 2012), which received the 2014 American Studies Network Book Prize for remarkable research in American studies, and which focused on Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy. With Liliana Sikorska, Joanna Jarząb-Napierała and Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska she has authored Between the Self and the Other: Essays on the Poetry of Paul Muldoon (2018), a study which fuses four perspectives: autobiographical, geopoetic, postcolonial and intertextual. She is a recipient of two research grants from the Polish-American Fulbright Foundation: a Junior Fulbright Research Grant (Stanford University, 2002-2003). Her current book project is devoted to intermediality and provisionally titled Turn of the Sign: Crisis of Representation in American Poetry and the Visual Arts. Concurrently, she is working on a comparative project involving posthumanist approaches to the North American and Polish.
